Time is a most interesting root foundation because it is important in our experience of the natural world, and the study of that world (as anyone who ever studied physics will know).
And time is also of importance in our psychological world, mental (cognitive) and feeling (emotional) world – our psyche. We do not perceive time to come from anywhere – it just is.
Now, as a root foundation, I am talking about the time that is concerned with being, not the time that is artificially divided up by humans into doing. And often the doing is work.
This is evident in our language as we refer to taking a break from work as time off, as if time is synonymous with work or doing, so when we have it off, we are doing nothing. And when doing nothing, we say that we have time to kill, as if it was something we have to get rid of. When we have to stop doing something, time is up. An expression we use for relaxation – down-time – is interesting too in that we generally associate the word down with negativity. And – I can’t resist it – doing time has another meaning also, i.e. being locked up in prison.
I will describe being-time as a felt time, the now, the wow, the moment, the dawn, dusk, the seasons, growth and decay, the time that we knew before we began to measure it, what we describe, perhaps, as lost-in-time, the time of the natural world…….
I suggest that it is also the at-ease time that, if we are parents, we spend with our children. This is different to the doing-time where our children are involved in organised activities, and very often competitive organised activities.
Now, time is a substantial factor in young people becoming involved in destructive behaviour, whether towards self or others. I believe that the first step on the road to feeling isolated, misunderstood, excluded and abandoned is that a child feels, from his own subjective experience that no-one takes the time to understand him.
This seems an unbelievable thing to say.
If we are parents and we think one of our children is troubled or heading-down-the-wrong-path we usually pour gazillions of time into him. In fact – we may feel that we are neglecting our other children while attending to the troubled one. The same goes if we are teachers, youth club leaders, or other concerned people.
But what we need to ask is what is the time used for? Maybe a lot of the time is spent cajoling, threatening, bribing, getting different experts, advising, arguing, trying to convince our child of the error of his ways, and suchlike behaviour.
Of course …………… that is what parents do!
But I believe that there is a balance to be struck between all the nagging and haggling and being present to the child’s distress, allowing the root foundations to grow, drawing and maintaining common-sense boundaries (in collaboration with the child as much as is possible), trusting the child, with being-time (and being-space) fostering integration and responsibility, from pre-toddler to late teens.
In fact, when we really think of it that might take a lot less time…..
On a final note on time, let us consider the concept of no-time, that is, eternity. In many religious traditions – certainly in the Catholic one that I am familiar with – we are informed that if we are good people we will go to heaven for eternity. (We used to be told all eternity, though I could never figure out the difference between eternity and all-eternity). And in this situation, there will be no time limit on our happiness.
(I often wondered if we were happy all the time would we know what happiness is – because we would have nothing to compare it to. But, of course, my thinking on this is limited by my human, logical brain)!
If time is an important root foundation then we practitioners need to take it seriously in both our day-to-day work and our long term planning. Rushing through quick-fix solutions and/or reintroducing old solutions that didn’t work and calling them something else needs to be resisted. Above all we need to listen.
This post refers to the power of listening …….. and true listening is done in being-time.